In this thesis, several computationally-efficient approximate soft demodulation schemes are developed for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. These soft demodulators are designed to be deployed in the conventional iterative receiver ('turbo') architecture, and they are designed to provide good performance at substantially lower computational cost than that of the exact soft demodulator. The proposed demodulators are based on the principle of list demodulation and can be classified into two classes, according to the nature of the list-generation algorithm. One class is based on a tree-search algorithm and the other is based on insight generated from the analysis of semidefinite relaxation techniques for hard demodulation.
The proposed tree-search demodulators are based on a multi-stack algorithm, developed herein, for efficiently traversing the tree structure that is inherent in the MIMO demodulation problem. The proposed scheme was inspired, in part, by the stack algorithm, which stores all the visited nodes in the tree in a single stack and chooses the next node to expand based on a 'best-first' selection scheme. The proposed algorithm partitions this global stack into a stack for each level of the tree. It examines the tree in the natural ordering of the levels and performs a best-first search in each of the stacks. By assigning appropriate priorities to the level at which the search for the next leaf node re-starts, the proposed demodulators can achieve performance-complexity trade-offs that dominate several existing soft demodulators, including those based on the stack algorithm and those based on 'sphere decoding' principles, especially in the low-complexity region.
In the second part of this thesis it is shown that the randomization procedure that is inherent in the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique for hard demodulation can be exploited to generate the list members required for list-based soft demodulation. The direct application of this observation yields list-based soft demodulators that only require the solution of one SDP per demodulation-decoding iteration. By approximating the randomization procedure by a set of independent Bernoulli trials, this requirement can be reduced to just one semidefinite program (SDP) per channel use. An advantage of these demodulators over those based on optimal tree-search algorithms is that the computational cost of solving the SDP is a low-order polynomial in the problem size. The analysis and simulation experiments provided in the thesis show that the proposed SDR-based demodulators offer an attractive trade-off between performance and computational cost.
The structure of the SDP in the proposed SDR-based demodulators depends on the signaling scheme, and the initial development focuses on the case of QPSK signaling. In the last chapter of this thesis, the extension to MIMO 16-QAM systems is developed, and some interesting observations regarding some existing SDR-based hard demodulation schemes for MIMO 16-QAM systems are derived. The simulation results reveal that the excellent performance-complexity trade-off of the proposed SDR-based schemes is preserved under the extension to 16-QAM signaling. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/16622 |
| Date | 08 1900 |
| Creators | Nekuii, Mehran |
| Contributors | Davidson, Timothy N., Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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